If you’re investing the time, money and resources into managing an email marketing or advertising campaign, you want to give it every opportunity to convert. While it may not be realistic for you to create a dedicated landing page for each and every marketing campaign, it is extremely beneficial to add the practice of landing page optimization into your marketing mix.

Photo: Landing by flickr member John Benson

Here’s why:

If someone has already made the effort to click on your marketing email or ad, you want to do everything in your power to convert them once they land on your site. According to a 2015 study conducted by Wishpond:

How well do your campaigns currently convert? Exactly. Driving people to a page that dramatically increases the chances of visitors doing what you want them to do is worth the additional investment in resources or technology (not to mention the skills you’ll learn in the process).

Welcome to the next in our monthly series featuring email creative that makes us tingle all over. This month we’re featuring emails that (more or less) honour the industry best practice of 60% text 40% images. In all cases, these emails show us the unlimited creativity that is possible when you work inside constraints.

Lots of big brands can get away with breaking the rules and featuring one, big image in their email creative simply because the have strong brand loyalty and a high open rate. Other brands are not so lucky. Ignoring industry standards can result in your email (regardless of how beautiful) being flagged as spam. This can affect your long-term deliverability.

The six emails below show us different ways of incorporating HTML text into spacious (and frankly, adorable) templates.

With timelines and approvals needed for every marketing email that goes out, it’s sometimes challenging to take a step back to devise ways to generate new growth. Rather than dreaming up a whole new creative strategy, focus on the small changes you can make to improve your clickthrough rate. By paying close attention to details, you can learn a lot about what works — and what doesn’t work — for your subscribers and customers.

When you’re looking at the big picture — email campaign metrics, month over month — sometimes it can be challenging to think about how little-picture changes can make a huge impact on your marketing email open rates.

Photo: Open by flickr member Chuck Coker

Rather than scaring up yet another big strategy, think small. Plan out a series of incremental changes that you can test gradually over time. Only your subscribers know what’s going to make them click. Through tweaking, testing and listening you will learn what works uniquely for your own subscriber base.

Improving your open rate, one test at a time

We know subscribers are unpredictable; never assume to know what will prompt your audience to open your email when maybe they haven’t before.

Even best practices can let you down. This is why we test. And we test each change or improvement on its own. While this does take more time, testing enables you to know without the shadow of a doubt that a specific adjustment is responsible for a change in user response rates.

Despite all the popular wisdom out there, your subscribers probably have a rhythm that is uniquely their own.

In just a few short months, both Gmail and Microsoft will implement a policy change requiring every email sent by one of their email addresses originate from their servers. These changes will come about in late 2016, when Gmail and Microsoft update their DMARC policy from p=“none” to p=“reject”. This may feel like deja-vu. And indeed, we have been here before with Yahoo! and AOL.

Photo: Road work ahead by flickr member Keturah Stickann

Gmail and Microsoft updating their DMARC policies is a pretty significant change, and one that will affect more senders than you think. How many of you are using bulk emailing tools with your own email address in the from field? Exactly. Following the implementation of these changes, if you are bulk emailing with a Gmail or Microsoft address in your from field, your email will be rejected.

Suffice to say, if you use an @gmail.com or @outlook.com address to send out your newsletters from a third party service provider, you’ll experience delivery issues.

Regardless of what your business does, whether you license tax software, or sell unicorn T-shirts online, stop for a minute to think about the different types of people who may be interested in your products or services. We like to call these types your customer personas.

Photo: La Smala Live Concert by flickr member Kmeron

Your what? Persona is just a fancy word for the collection of character traits that identify a type of person; in other words, how he or she is perceived by others. Once you map and understand your real life customer personas, it becomes a lot easier to build campaigns that tap into your customers’ real desires and interests.

Maybe you developed customer personas when you first wrote your business or marketing plan. That’s a good start. If you did, take some time to revisit them. People, businesses and markets change every single day.

Welcome to our first monthly roundup of beautiful email content, where we share some of the industry’s best work, and explain why we love it so.

Photo: Havel’s Heart by flickr member European Parliament

It’s not a stretch to say that some of the best creativity in the digital universe is being applied to email marketing. Our inboxes are filled with emails that delight, tell stories and push boundaries. It’s one of the reasons why email marketing has truly hit its stride: creating email content has become a creative discipline in its own right.

So let’s cut to the chase. Below, are six marketing emails that make our hearts go pitter patter. In the spirit of sharing our true feelings with you, we’ve rated each email: Crush, Infatuation or True Love.

Traditional digital display advertising has its limitations: it doesn’t convert well, and even if display does drive sales, it can be difficult to attribute conversions to your display ads.

Enter CRM retargeting, the performance-oriented cousin of display advertising. Advertisers have found that if they show just the right ads to just the right subscribers — particularly if those customers have previously engaged with their brand — they can generate high quality traffic that converts.

Simply described, CRM retargeting is the process of showing display or search ads to people who are on your subscriber lists. By segmenting your lists based on behaviour or demographic, you can create multiple campaigns with creative dedicated to attracting and converting those exact customers.

As a marketer, you already know: email marketing is hotter than ever. Study after study shows that consumers still rely on email, they’re just using it differently. Get ready for some statistics that will make you fall in love with email marketing all over again.

Photo: Benchmark, by flickr member Tim Green

Email marketing is alive and kicking

We’ve all heard the stories. Tales about about how no one uses email anymore, about how entire organizations have implemented collaboration systems that render the inbox obsolete. The kids on Snapchat tell one another that email is for old people, and your friends stay in touch via chat and social platforms.

Every platform has a purpose. We may not use email for absolutely everything anymore, but it remains a big part of our lives. In the midst of all of these changes, email has prevailed and reinvented itself.

The inbox has reinvented itself

We may use email differently, but it remains a key part of consumers’ day to day. We rely on email to keep track of our purchases, our bookings, and our itineraries. And we ask for our favourite brands to send us shiny updates, so we know what’s on sale and when that new item is hitting the shelves.

In 2011, Kevin Huxham, CakeMail’s very own DoD (Director of Deliverability), wrote this article highlighting best practices for the Holidays. We’ve updated the article – mostly adding links to other articles we’ve written recently – but the advice is timeless… and worth the read to jog the memory!

Don’t you just love the Holidays? I don’t.

Well, I do love the holidays really, but the truth is that for email delivery folks it’s a very stressful time of year. Not only do email volumes go through the roof, but people seem to forget (or ignore) some basic rules of email marketing that they wouldn’t otherwise think of doing throughout the year.

Because the lure of sending email to as many people as possible to increase ROI is just too good to pass up this time of year, typically good senders can sometimes turn a blind eye when it comes to best practices. They reactivate inactive users, they use lists that haven’t been sent anything in months, they send 5 emails a week instead of the usual 1 etc, etc. Continue reading “Blacklist Friday” »